Comcast and NBCUniversal’s new Peacock subscription streaming video service will contain a significant amount of live sports coverage, including extensive coverage of this summer’s Tokyo Olympics.
The OTT platform, which will roll out nationwide in the United States on July 15, nine days before the Summer Games, will feature live coverage of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies before they air on NBC in primetime. It will also stream three daily Olympic shows, Tokyo Live, Tokyo Daily Digest, and Tokyo Tonight.
The service, which will first go live on April 15 for select Comcast customers, will also include non-televised Premier League soccer games beginning in August and Ryder Cup matches in September. It will be available in three tiers: $9.99 a month without commercials, $4.99 a month with ads, and a limited version that will be free to customers.
Comcast executives hope to grow Peacock – which joins Disney+ and Netflix among many others in an increasingly crowded direct-to-consumer streaming space – to between 30 million and 35 million active accounts by 2024.
In December, NBC Sports said the network has surpassed $1bn in US ad sales for the Tokyo Olympics, and remains firmly on track to break its prior Olympics highwater mark of $1.2bn registered for the Rio 2016 Games. NBCUniversal overall is planning more than 7,000 total hours of Olympics coverage from Tokyo across broadcast, cable, digital, and social platforms.